Any Prospect for a Green Reformation?

I have an article appearing in the next print issue of National Review that goes to the printer Friday afternoon about the prospects of a Martin Luther/95 Theses nailed to the (Green) church door Reformation of environmentalism. The environmental movement is so intellectually shallow and politically bankrupt that it seems unlikely that such a thing could happen, especially with the literal commissars who enforce the party line so rigidly. But there are a couple of interesting straws in the wind.

Along the way I refer to the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope (appropriate last name for this theme I guess?) as the most doctrinaire member of the environmental Politburo (okay, so this mixes metaphors a bit), but I left out another favorite comparison of mine, which is that Greenpeace really ought to be regarded as the John Birch Society of environmentalism, whose extremism ought to suffice to have them ostracized and marginalized by the rest of the supposedly “mainstream” environmental movement, in just the same way William F. Buckley and other conservative leaders worked to eject the John Birch Society from the ranks of the Right 50 years ago. Needless to say, this does not happen.

Not only does Greenpeace enjoy respect from the other green advocacy groups; it even gets to write official reports for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the supposedly “authoritative” body whose “consensus” on climate science we are all demanded to bow down before. Recently the IPCC issued a ludicrous report arguing that it was possible to meet 80 percent the planet’s energy needs by the year 2050 with “renewable” energy sources, which was perhaps true only if you overlooked the fact that one of the major “renewable” sources of energy projected for poor countries was the continued large-scale use of “biomass.” Translation: poor people would keep cutting down more trees and burning more cow dung. The report was so shoddy that it hardly bothered debunking.

Turns out that one of the authors of the report is a Greenpeace staffer, and this affiliation was not disclosed by the IPCC. But even if it was, what is a Greenpeace nutcase doing writing such a report for a supposedly expert body concerned with its credibility?

The latest issue of Nature magazine, usually a cheerleader for the IPCC and the whole climate agenda, has an editorial out today scolding the IPCC: “Shot With Its Own Gun.”

Now, Nature clearly wants to backstop the IPCC, but finds it impossible to do so after the serial blunders of the organization. You know things are bad when even Nature is finding it hard to stick up for these guys:

There is no escaping the fact that the IPCC operates in a latently hostile environment. [From who? Not the major media, who laps up their “findings” and never makes any criticism.] Its critics are vocal, frequently melodramatic and unlikely to surrender the limelight any time soon. The IPCC has to stop handing them ammunition on a plate.

Well, what do you expect from an organization whose chairman, the egregious Rajendra Pachauri, reached for the repellent reduction ad Hitlerum when Bjorn Lomborg applied well-accepted cost-benefit analysis to the IPCC’s policy agenda. Pachauri told a Danish newspaper in 2004: “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s? If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.”

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of person we should believe about climate science and policy to deal with it?